Lead story

Alphabet beats big, then rattles Wall Street with a $205 billion spending plan

The search giant's profit nearly quadrupled, but its ballooning AI budget did the talking.

Alphabet reported second-quarter earnings of $9.11 a share, up about 294 percent, on revenue of $103.62 billion, with Google Cloud revenue accelerating to 82 percent growth. Investors focused less on the beat than on the bill: the company lifted its 2026 capital spending forecast to between $195 billion and $205 billion, up from a prior range of $180 billion to $190 billion, to keep pace with AI demand. Shares slipped after the report and helped drag the Nasdaq down 2.2 percent on Thursday, as the market weighed whether the payoff from hyperscaler spending can justify its scale.

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Tech & AI →

Moonshot AI eyes a $50 billion valuation before a Hong Kong IPO

China's Moonshot AI is lining up a final pre-IPO round at a valuation as high as $50 billion ahead of a Hong Kong listing, after its 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model pushed annual recurring revenue to $300 million.

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Stripe in talks to buy AI marketplace OpenRouter for close to $10 billion

Payments giant Stripe is in talks to acquire the AI model marketplace OpenRouter for roughly $10 billion, about eight times the startup's $1.3 billion valuation just two months ago.

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Business & Markets →

Wall Street sells off as AI spending worries spread

Stocks fell across the board Thursday, the Dow shedding 507 points (1 percent), the S&P 500 off 1.2 percent and the Nasdaq sliding 2.2 percent to 25,137.69 as oil climbed and hyperscaler budgets ballooned.

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Surging oil and heavy mega-cap spending weigh on stocks

Crude prices jumped on renewed Middle East tension, compounding pressure from mega-cap AI outlays and pulling all three major indexes lower into the close.

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Science →

Webb uncovers a hidden giant planet orbiting Beta Pictoris

NASA's Webb telescope found Beta Pictoris d, a world at least twice Jupiter's mass hidden inside a bright debris disk 63 light-years away, detected by its atmosphere's chemical fingerprint rather than a direct image.

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Antarctica offers decades of warning on sea level rise

A Nature study finds Antarctic ice loss stays reliably predictable until about mid-century, giving governments a 30-to-50-year window to plan for the sea level rise it will bring.

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Letters to the King

Were you afraid when you walked out to face Goliath, or did the fear only come later?

From the Baker's own shelf

The fear was real, friend, yet it did not sit at the front of the tent. I had already met the lion and the bear over my father's sheep, and the hand that shut their jaws had not grown any shorter by that afternoon. What the Philistine saw was a boy with a stick. What I saw was a man who had mocked the living God and forgotten to guard his own brow. If you want the whole truth, the trembling came later, that night, when the shouting had died down and I sat alone and understood how tall he had truly been. Courage is not the absence of the shakes. It is doing the next faithful thing before your knees are consulted. Gather your five smooth stones while the sun is up, and let the giant furnish the rest.

– David, King in Jerusalem

Mail carried to the throne by the Baker – leave your own letter at the chronicles.

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